The Management of Debris Flow in Disaster Prevention using an Ontology-based Knowledge Management System

In recently years, the government, academia and business have applied different information technologies to disaster prevention and diverse web sites have been developed. Although these web sites provide a large number of data about disaster-prevention, they are knowledge poor in nature. Furthermore, disaster-prevention is a knowledge-intensive task and a potential knowledge management system can overcome the shortcoming of knowledge poor. On the other hand, ontology design plays the key role toward designing a successful knowledge management system. In this paper, we introduce a three-stage life cycle for ontology design for supporting the service of disaster prevention of debris flow and propose a framework of an ontology-based knowledge management system with the KAON API environment. In addition, by appealing to the technology of component reuse, the system is developed at lower cost thus knowledge workers can focus on the design of ontology and knowledge objects. The objectives of the proposed system is to facilitate knowledge accumulation, knowledge reuse and dissemination for the management of disaster prevention. This work is expected to enable the promotion of the traditional disaster management of debris flow towards the so-called knowledge-driven decision support services

A SEEMINGLY UNRELETED REGRESSION ANALYSIS ON THE TRADING BEHAVIOR OF MUTUAL FUND INVESTORS

This paper provides a comprehensive investigation on the causality relationship between fund performance and trading flows. We analyze if investors behave asymmetrically in fund purchasing and selling by seemingly unrelated regression which comprises several individual relationships that are linked by the fact that their disturbances or the error terms are correlated. The empirical result shows a significantly negative relationship between fund performance and purchase flows for domestic funds. The magnitude of domestic funds redemption negatively affects current return, but not for international funds. As previousfund return positively affects current net flows,the further lagged performances have no significant impact on the trading flows, revealing that fund investors are sensitive only to short-term past performance. Most importantly, while negative fund performance leads to the increases in redemption, positive performance contrarily leads to the decreases in purchase. The evidences strongly indicate an asymmetry behavior of fund investors in the return-purchase causality relations

App Review Analytics Of Free Games Listed On Google Play

Smartphones have become popular in recent years; in turn, the number of application developers and publishers has grown rapidly. To understand users’ app preferences, many platforms such as Google Play provide different mechanism that allows users to rank apps. However, more detailed insights on user’s feelings, experiences, critiques, suggestions, or preferences are missing due to a lack of additional written comments. This research attempts to investigate the review analytics of Android games listed on Google Play using a proposed text analytic approach to extract all user reviews from game apps in Chinese. A total of 207,048 reviews of 4,268 free games from February to March 2013 are extracted and analyzed according to various metrics including game type and game attribute. The findings indicate there is high dependency between users’ gender and game type, males and females have differing opinions on game attributes. In particular, users of different game types prefer different game attributes. The results reveal product usage insights, as well as best practices for developers

Regulation of shear-induced nuclear translocation of the Nrf2 transcription factor in endothelial cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Vascular endothelial cells (ECs) constantly experience fluid shear stresses generated by blood flow. Laminar flow is known to produce atheroprotective effects on ECs. Nrf2 is a transcription factor that is essential for the antioxidant response element (ARE)-mediated induction of genes such as heme-oxygenase 1 (HO-1). We previously showed that fluid shear stress increases intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) in ECs. Moreover, oxidants are known to stimulate Nrf2. We thus examined the regulation of Nrf2 in cultured human ECs by shear stress.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Exposure of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) to laminar shear stress (12 dyne/cm²) induced Nrf2 nuclear translocation, which was inhibited by a phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor, a protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitor, and an antioxidant agent N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), but not by other protein kinase inhibitors. Therefore, PI3K, PKC, and ROS are involved in the signaling pathway that leads to the shear-induced nuclear translocation of Nrf2. We also found that shear stress increased the ARE-binding activity of Nrf2 and the downstream expression of HO-1.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data suggest that the atheroprotective effect of laminar flow is partially attributed to Nrf2 activation which results in ARE-mediated gene transcriptions, such as HO-1 expression, that are beneficial to the cardiovascular system.</p

The Volcanic Earthquake Swarm of October 20, 2009 in the Tatun Area of Northern Taiwan

On October 20, 2009, a series of felt earthquakes with local magnitudes ranging from 2.8 - 3.2 occurred in the Tatun volcanic area off the northern tip of Taiwan. Although there was no damage caused by those earthquakes, many residents in the Taipei metropolitan area, particularly for people who live near the Yangminshan National Park, felt strong ground shaking. In order to know what the possible mechanisms were that generated those earthquakes, we carefully examined seismic data recorded by a dense seismic array in the Tatun volcanic area. During the period between October 18 and 22, 2009 we detected at least 202 micro-earthquakes. Most of the earthquakes were relocated using the double-difference method and were clustered in the shallow crust beneath the Dayoukeng area, which is the strongest fumarole in the Tatun volcanic area. Among these earthquakes, 72 focal mechanisms were determined by polarizing the first P-wave motion. Most earthquakes belonged to normal faulting. An extremely high b-value of 2.17 was obtained from those earthquakes. Based on the seismic variations in both the temporary and spatial distribution as well as an extremely high b-value, we conclude that the earthquake sequence on October 20, 2009 was a typically seismic swarm associated with possible active volcanism in the Tatun volcanic area